Is the Family Research Council Shooting a Hate Crime?

 Yahoo News reports

FBI officials said Thursday that the shooting of a security guard at the Family Research Council's D.C. headquarters on Wednesday may fall in the "hate crime/terrorism nexus," depending on the shooter's motive. 

FRC is a socially conservative Christian advocacy organization that opposes gay marriage and abortion, among its other causes. In an interview on Fox News Thursday, FRC President Tony Perkins said he thought the attack should be classified as "terrorism," but some other commentators have suggested that the shooting may also qualify as a hate crime, if it can be proven that the attacker was targeting the group's religious beliefs.

Suspected shooter Floyd Lee Corkins II "has strong opinions with respect to those he believes do not treat homosexuals in a fair manner," according to his parents, and Corkins is said to have yelled that he did not like FRC's politics before opening fire. He was also found with a backpack that contained more than a dozen Chick-Fil-a sandwiches.

This is the story about which Fat White Man quipped, "Why are Lefties so violent."

Well, I guess on the surface that's a fair question.  What do you think? Does this case prove that the lunatic gun maniacs are not limited to the Right side of the political spectrum?  Or is this the exception that proves the rule?

There's no denying that by targeting a notorious right-wing organization one probably belongs to the Left, but what about those Chick-Fil-A sandwiches in his backpack?  What could that be all about? It sounds to me like Floyd was just another mixed up gun owner.

No, I'm afraid it's not as simple as Left vs. Right.  There are plenty of fanatical gun owners who hold certain "Lefty" ideals. Some of them feel sympathetic towards homosexual cases, I suppose some of them are gay themselves.

No, the distinction when it comes to gun ownership is not whether a person is left-leaning or right-leaning politically, but whether they are of sound mind and responsible.  Guys who fail in those categories and believe the gun is the answer to whatever problem they have are a danger. And as much as the rest of the gun-loving community tries to deny it, they are too many.

What's your opinion?  Please leave a comment.

Driftglass on the Left and the Right

Driftglass wrote a wonderful piece about the differences between the Left and Right over the last 40 years.

I could go on -- endlessly (as if I haven't already :-) -- but the point is this:  there is no bigger, more destructive and more commonly repeated lie in American politics today than "Both Sides Do It".  Nothing else even comes close (all of the Right's gigantic, treasonous lies about Iraq, for example, eventually had to give grudging way to the realities of the catastrophic losses and failures to which that enterprise was doomed.)

Of course, none of the Bush Administration's various war criminals and Useful Idiots were ever docked so much as a day's pay or an erg Beltway prestige once their lies caught up with them (in fact a disturbing number of America's leading Neoconservative traitors actually leveraged their treachery into lucrative career advancements).  And of course once the Bush Administration's staggering concatenation of fraud, failure and lies started to blow in their faces, the party bosses had a whole new suit of lies ready and waiting to replace the old, worn out ones.

Memo to Glenn Beck

The Canada Free Press published an incredible "memo to Glenn Beck" by Philip V. Brennan. The opening lines say it all.

There are few people who I admire more than Glenn Beck. As a latter day Paul Revere he is alerting the American people to the to the real perils inherent in the Obama Administration’s drive to deliberately wreck the economy and impose a Marxist regime upon the United States.

Remarkably, from there he goes on to urge Glenn to give Joe McCarthy another look, you know the misunderstood-due-to-a-lefty-conspiracy Joe McCarthy.

It's a wonderful read. Enjoy.

Conservative or Liberal; Right or Left

The L.A. Times has a wonderful article on the idea that people are pre-disposed genetically to be conservative or liberal. At first it sounds a little crazy, but the more I read, the more I thought they were talking about me.

They found to their surprise that opinions on such contentious subjects as gun control, pacifism and capital punishment are strongly associated with physiological traits that are probably present at birth.

But then I noticed that the experiment included 46 subjects. It reminded me of something I've been admonished about on this blog. I took my own individual gun experiences and tried to extrapolate a general theory from them. Of course that's a faulty proposition, or at least it's likely to be. The same problem may exist in this case.

As I read more, though, I realized the experiment was a truly incisive glimpse into the differences between conservatives and liberals. What could be more irrefutable than eye blinks?

In a second experiment, researchers measured eye blinks -- another indicator of fear -- as subjects responded to sudden blasts of noise.

People with strongly conservative views were three times more fearful than staunch liberals after the effects of gender, age, income and education were factored out.

I'm pretty much ready to write this one off as another kooky idea to come out of California. But, I do like this idea:

Fowler said the study added to the growing research suggesting that over millions of years, humans have developed two cognitive styles -- conservative and liberal. Cautious conservatives prevented societies from taking undue risks, while more flexible liberals fostered cooperation.

"For the species to survive, you need both," he said.

What's your opinion? Feel free to leave a comment.